Saturday, December 20, 2008

Duck hunting, searching for the elusive mallard

Dear Ed,

Hope all is well and you are feeling a little better!

Greetings from Lizard Lake and the Lodge!

Well, as you can see, Sarge came with us from the Lodge to play in the tournament.

You may have guessed already that Sarge was in the Canadian Army. After a number of years he realized that he hadn't once shot his weapon in anger or in defense of Saskatchewan. In fact, he barely shot it at all at the firing range because of the bad ammo the army bought on the cheap from some young weapons supplier down in Florida.

So he retired and settled in up at Lizard Lake.

Something you need to understand about Sarge is his passion for duck hunting. He is some kind of duck hunting fool. He could be out there morning, noon, or night on the end of that old dock Drifty built.

He provided the Lodge with an unlimited supply of ducks for the Old Boys dinners, for the 1st or 2nd 15's drink-ups and even for the unders games. We just told them it was hamburgers and they ate them.

He cooked duck burgers for the unders, duck chili for the 1st team, sweet and sour duck for the 2nd team, and all the leftovers went in the freezer for the start of some interesting potluck dish by those who must be obeyed.

The problem began a few year ago after the club (out of appreciation for all the meat he supplied the Lodge) built a nice blind for Sarge out on the end of the dock. He spent even more time down there blasting away.

He blasted away so much, and was so proficient at it that I think he got just a little too complacent.

We stopped sending the lads down there after the corp of moms rebelled over the safety of their kids. The Old Boys stopped visiting after they startled him and two of them came back looking like a lawyer on a Dick Cheney quail hunt.

But all good things must come to an end and it happened to Sarge for awhile. Either the ducks got fewer or they got smarter, but they stopped visiting the lake.

Sarge was despondent and Vic, Harold and I felt terrible seeing a grown man in such a sorry state. So we put our collective heads together and came up with a scheme to attract more ducks back to the Lodge.

Harold found some decoys on the mantle at one of the Old Boys, we screwed them to the top of our logging helmets, held them on with chin straps and then dressed in wool clothing.

See we figured that the ducks might be fooled if they saw decoys moving around, back and forth, bobbing up and down instead of those old ones just sitting there.

The next day Sarge tied some free weights (from the Old Boys workout room - they don't use them anyway) around our ankles and we proceeded to walk out in front of the dock.

And son-of-a-gun the tactic worked. The ducks started coming back.

But then another problem developed. We could only stay under water so long and it became a necessity, a fact of life that we surface. But then we scared off the ducks!